Vipassana

10 days Meditation. 10 days holding the noble silence. It was definitely a unique experience and it was a lot of suffering. basic conditions, no running water, no electricity, maintaining a dayly program from 4.30 am. till 9.30 pm. learning meditiation and not changing your position for hours... it was hard-core, I can tell you. To get used to the basic conditions was the easyest, maintaining the strict discipline was a bit more difficult, the physical pain of the hourly-long sitting in the same position was already quite a task. The tiredness and the hunger - we got only two meals and a snack a day - was hard to sustain. But the biggest challenge was definitely the confrontation with your own mind. The experiences varied widely but for most of us students it was a confrontation with your inner self, with memories, problems, complexes, plans, whishes, dreams, just with anything stored in your mind, consciously or subconsciously, positive or negative, just everything popped up, appeared, disappeared again. My mood changed up and down. I suffered and enjoyed moments of cheerfullness. The tiredness was overwhelming very often and I could not really concentrate on the meditation technique but instead my mind was full of pictures, memories, problems, dreams, it was a purification of mind and soul. It really was. But it was not a complete purification, no, just a first step on learning how to become balanced and on how to improve your living quality. I can recommend it to everyone.
We were a student group of about 30 persons, about 5 of them left earlier. the age of the poeple ranged from 20 to 64 and they came from places like Switzerland (biggest group, how amazing - we overrode the Israelis), Israel, Germany, Italy, France, Sweden, South-Africa, England, Australia, Holland and Finland. So mainly western-european but a wide range of different ages.
Still, we could not talk to each other anyway. The first word I uttered after the noble silence was broken??? I was really insecure and was thinking who I should talk to, what I should say... well, suddenly Jorrit my travelling companion stood besides me and started talking to me and I just laughed and laughed. Well, this has also something to do with the common humour Jorrit and me developped after weeks and week of travelling together. It happened very often during the ten days that I looked at his face and almost broke out into laughter because the whole situation just seemed so absurd to me. All these people around me with suffering faces, over-tired and starving, everyone tortured with his inner turmoile. Everyone, including me -excluding Jorrit- suffered like hell. But there were outbursts of overwhelming joy and cheerfullness and I was just happy with everything. For me, the tiredness and the hunger was worst. Apart from that I could handle it and I will definitely continue this technique and try to become harmonic:-)
So, harmony to you all.
Cheers.
Misho.